MOSCOW (AFP) – Wildfires raging close to Russia’s main nuclear research centre have grown in size and emergency services are working round the clock to contain the blaze, officials said on Friday.

Russia has sent thousands of firefighters to douse wildfires close to its top nuclear research centre in Sarov, a town in the Nizhny Novgorod region still closed to foreigners as in Soviet times.

A Russian firefighter sprays water on a forest fire blaze at the Losiny Ostrov nature reserve in Moscow. AFP

“The fire which appeared in the eastern part of the nature reserve two days ago after lightning struck a pine tree has grown in size and now presents a certain danger,” the head of the emergencies ministry for Mordovia, Major General Vyacheslav Kormilitsyn, said in a statement.

Meanwhile the first significant rain for weeks poured down on Moscow on Friday although forecasters said the heatwave that has left tens of thousands of hectares of land ablaze and destroyed a quarter of Russian crops would continue over the next days.

Despite signs of public frustration with the authorities, a heavy police presence ensured only a few dozen activists turned out for a protest against the Moscow mayor’s handling of the crisis, several of whom were then arrested.

A dramatic storm with rain throughout the night hit Moscow. Temperatures up to 32 degrees Celsius were expected later in the day — hotter than usual but still cooler than temperatures edging up to 40 degrees recorded earlier.

There was little sign of the smog from the wildfires that had blighted the Russian capital in the last week but new reports emerged accusing the authorities of hiding the true health toll from the heatwave.

Moscow’s top health official has already said the mortality rate had doubled in the heatwave, with hundreds more deaths every day than in usual periods. However the federal authorities have refused to confirm these figures.

The Interfax news agency quoted Moscow doctors as saying they had been forbidden to give “heatstroke” as a cause of death to keep a lid on the statistics.

“We received the order not to use the diagnosis ‘heatstroke’. We are told that the statistics for heatstroke were mounting up,” one doctor told the news agency.

“There was no official order, everything is has been communicated orally,” the source added.

News website lifenews.ru even published a picture of what it said was an informal order pinned up in a Moscow hospital saying: “Attention! Do not use the diagnosis heatstroke!”

“This is done so that the statisics, including cases of death connected with the heatwave, do not mount up,” a medical source told the website. There was no immediate official confirmation.

Several dozen activists gathered outside Moscow’s city hall Thursday evening for an unsanctioned protest against mayor Yuri Luzhkov, where they were quickly surrounded by riot police.

Around 20 people were arrested including veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov and Left Front leader Sergey Udaltsov, who was prevented from joining the demonstration.

Luzhkov controversially remained on holiday as the city’s health crisis mounted, only returning on Sunday.

With the full impact of the drought and fires becoming clear, President Dmitry Medvedev said one quarter of Russia’s crops had been lost and many farms were now on the verge on bankruptcy.

Russia has banned grain exports and US government slashed its 2010-11 global supply forecasts by around 2.5 percent from last month’s estimates, on lower than expected production from the former Soviet Union.

Fires have also blazed in neighbouring Ukraine, with the emergency services working to put out a two-hectare (five-acre) peat bog fire 60 kilometres (35 miles) from Chernobyl.

Russian officials say they have recovered a body from a provincial village gutted by wildfires, while another victim has died in the hospital, taking the death toll from hundreds of blazes nationwide to at least 50.

Local residents cover their faces with cloth, with a heavy smog shrouding the forest, outside the town of Elektrogorsk, some 60 km (37 miles) east of the capital Moscow, August 3, 2010

The Emergencies Ministry said in a statement Thursday that almost 600 separate fires were still raging, mostly in Russia’s European territory, to the west.

A thick smog that had blanketed Moscow partially lifted early Thursday but could return, officials warned.

Russia is suffering through its worst heat wave on record, pushing forest and peat fires across its central and western regions. Temperatures for weeks have soared as high as 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) in Moscow, where the average summer temperature usually is around 23 Celsius (75 Fahrenheit).

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin revealed he met and even sang patriotic Soviet songs with the group of Russian spies deported from the United States in the biggest espionage swap since the Cold War.

Putin, who himself served as a KGB agent in the ex-East Germany in the dying years of the Soviet Union, said the group included Anna Chapman, the Russian woman whose glamorous looks turned her into a tabloid star worldwide.

“I met with them. We talked about life. We sang. It was not karaoke but live music,” Putin told Russian reporters on a visit to Ukraine, according to a transcript posted Sunday on the government website.

“We sang ‘From Where the Motherland Begins’,” a hugely popular 1960s song made famous in a USSR film about a Soviet spy working in Nazi Germany.

“I’m not joking, I am serious. And other songs with a similar content,” said Putin.

Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rides Harley Davidson Lehman Trike decorated with Russian and Ukrainian national flags as he arrives for the meeting with motorbikers at their camp near Sevastopol in Ukraine’s Crimea on July 24, 2010

The group of 10 spies, many of whom had been working for years undercover in the United States as sleeper agents, returned to Russia earlier this month in a swap that saw Moscow send four Russian convicts to the West.

The 10 Kremlin agents had been arrested in an FBI swoop that initially threatened to derail a rapid improvement in Russia-US relations championed by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Putin hinted that the agents’ cover had been blown as a result of “treason” and that he knew the names of those responsible.

“This was the result of treason and traitors always end badly. They finish up as drunks, addicts, on the street,” said Putin.

But Putin indicated that the deported spooks would not be left without employment. “They will work, I am sure, they will work in worthy places. I do not doubt that they will have an interesting, bright life.”

He did not give further details on his encounter with Chapman, saying only that she had been present at the meeting. He did not say when or where the meeting had taken place.

Without talking specifically about the work of the deported spies, Putin praised the work of Russian agents, saying they “have a difficult life, every one of them.”

“You need to fulfil the task set in the interests of your motherland for many many years, not counting on diplomatic cover, exposing to danger yourself and your loved ones,” said Putin.

State President Nguyen Minh Triet on July 22 received Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov while he is in Vietnam to attend the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEAN-Russia Foreign Ministers’ Meeting.

Both expressed their pleasure at the development of the two countries’ relationship over the past few years, especially in politics, security, defence, economies, trade, culture, education, science and technology.

Triet said that he believed the visits by senior officials, including the recent visit by Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh to Russia have helped the strategic partnership between the two countries to flourish, adding that Russia is an important strategic partner for Vietnam.

“The State and people of Vietnam wish for further consolidation and development of the friendship and cooperation with Russia,” he said.

He also praised Russia’s role and contribution to ASEAN, adding that Vietnam is preparing to welcome President Dmitry Medvedev at the second ASEAN-Russia Summit.

In his reply, Lavrov said he believed that President Medvedev’s official visit to Vietnam will create new momentum for the strategic partnership and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries forward. He also affirmed Russia’s support for ASEAN’s role in ensuring security in Asia.

In this undated file photo, Peruvian-born journalist Vicky Pelaez, one of the defendants in the Russian spy case, is seen on assignment in Lima,

The government said Tuesday it planned to appeal a decision to release one of the defendants in the Russian spy case on bail.

The announcement came from U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, four days after bail was set for a U.S. citizen charged in the case.

A magistrate judge in Manhattan had said the woman, Peruvian-born Vicky Pelaez, could be released on $250,000 bail with electronic monitoring and home detention. The judge said when he set bail that she could not be released before this week because it would take time to set up the bail requirements.

An appeal means that a bail hearing will occur before a federal judge, who will decide whether to uphold the findings of the magistrate judge.

Defense attorney John M. Rodriguez said Tuesday that he received a copy of a letter prosecutors had sent the court saying they were appealing. He said he expected his client to remain jailed pending the outcome of a hearing Wednesday afternoon.

Pelaez is among 11 defendants charged with being part of a spy ring that prosecutors say for the past ast decade has engaged in secret global travel with false passports, secret code words, fake names, invisible ink and encrypted radio.

The government has opposed the release on bail of any of the defendants, saying they would flee if they had the opportunity. Defendant Christopher Metsos disappeared on the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus soon after a judge there freed him on $32,500 bail. He had been charged by U.S. authorities with supplying funds to the other members of the alleged ring.

Pelaez, a prominent Spanish-language journalist, is the wife of a defendant identified in court documents as Juan Lazaro. Prosecutors say he has admitted that his wife passed letters to the Russian intelligence service on his behalf.

They say he also has admitted that the name Juan Lazaro is fake, that he wasn’t born in Uruguay and that he is not a citizen of Peru, as he had long claimed.

Prosecutors say he also admits his home in Yonkers, N.Y., has been paid for by Russian intelligence.